Start with The Call of Cthulhu. It is about fifty pages, and it establishes the formula everything else assumes: a scholarly narrator assembles documents — a dead relative's papers, a police report, a sailor's diary — and reasons his way to a conclusion that destroys him. The three fragments only mean anything laid side by side, and that triangulation is why the story founded a shared mythology rather than just a monster.
Say the other thing first, because it does not stay in the background. Lovecraft was a racist; the racism is explicit and pervasive, and it is inside the fiction rather than confined to his letters. Fear of foreigners, of mixed ancestry and of hereditary contamination is in several major stories the mechanism of the horror rather than a blemish on it. The Call of Cthulhu describes its cult in openly racial terms in the first stage of this path, and it recurs in every stage after.
There is also no publication order to follow, which is the single most useful thing to know before buying anything. He wrote no real novels, assembled no collections of his own, and published in pulp magazines, so every omnibus in print is somebody's later arrangement. What follows is an order of stories, not of books — and a practical warning: most of these titles are sold both as slim single-story volumes and inside the same complete collections, so buying them one at a time will get you the same text several times over. One good complete edition covers the whole path.
Start here: the three essential stories
The Call of Cthulhu, The colour out of space, The Dunwich Horror. One story per sitting; the sentences are dense and adjectival, and reading two in a night flattens them into one. The colour out of space has almost no Mythos machinery at all — no Necronomicon, no named god, no cult — and Lovecraft called it his own favourite; read second, it proves the effect never depended on the furniture. The Dunwich Horror supplies the props the longer works assume, and is his most conventional story in shape, with scholars who win.
The Mythos at full stretch
Whisperer in the Darkness, The shadow over Innsmouth, At the Mountains of Madness. The first is the best-plotted thing he wrote, running as a correspondence in which the horror arrives through a shift in tone rather than an event. The shadow over Innsmouth is his most purely frightening story and also where the racial anxiety is most exposed: the horror is interbreeding, the town's decline is written as racial degeneration, and the ending turns on the narrator finding the taint in his own ancestry. At the Mountains of Madness is the long one and needs a week to ten days; do not start it tired, because its first third is expedition logistics and geology and readers who push through half-asleep never reach the payoff.
The long ones
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is the closest thing he wrote to a novel and he never published it in his lifetime — antiquarian rather than cosmic, and set in a real, mapped Providence. The shadow out of time is the purest statement of his deep time and the direct companion to At the Mountains of Madness. The dream-quest of unknown Kadath is the outlier, and should be read knowing it: no documents, no cosmic indifference, no Mythos in any usual sense, but a picaresque wander through invented geography in the manner of Lord Dunsany. If the cosmic stories work on you and this one does not, that is the normal reaction rather than a failure of attention.
The completist tail
Rats in the Walls is early and pre-Mythos, and its final page — the narrator's language regressing through centuries of English into something pre-linguistic — is one of the best endings he wrote. It is also one of the ugliest things in the body of work: the narrator's cat carries a name that is a racial slur, printed in full in every unexpurgated text and recurring throughout, and some editions silently alter it, which is worth knowing so you can tell which text you are holding. Dreams in the Witch House is a late deep cut rather than an entry point. Supernatural Horror in Literature closes the path because it is Lovecraft explaining what he thought he was doing, and it is the best reading list anyone finishing this path could be handed.
Where to stop
After the three novellas is the natural stop; that stretch is the work everything else is measured against. Browse Discover for more ordered routes.
Follow the full ordered path here: H.P. Lovecraft Reading Order: Where to Start.
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